Basic Metrics and Concepts

Basic Metrics and Concepts

When you begin looking at your Google Analytics metrics, you might find
some of them confusing

you’ll have a clearer understanding of how
Google arrives at the metrics that it displays, and what those numbers mean to
you as far as building and capitalizing on web site traffic are concerned

Identifying People and Not-People



* Google Analytics counts IP addresses (from your web browser) as people. But there are many visits to your web site that don’t actually come from people using a web browser.

* These not-people are applications—spiders, crawlers, and robots—that are assigned the task of reviewing your web site for some reason Ex:

"search engines use these critters for the purpose of examining
and classifying your web site for search engine results"


People : your web browser requests a page to display for
you from a web server, and in that request is a header that identifies where
the request is coming from.


not-people : The crawler identifies itself in the same way your web browser does,and it also usually provides a name or some other credential Google web crawler identifies itself as Googlebot

To be slightly more technical about these crawlers, when they request a web site, they request a stripped-down version of the site. The crawler doesn’t need all the aesthetics that you and I need or want to see on a web site.

The next major difference is in how the crawler identifies what it wants. Rather than tell the web server it wants a page, it tells the web server that it wants information from the page. This is usually accomplished when the crawler identifies itself as a user agent (such as Googlebot) by sending an HTTP request that asks for a different version of the web site.

The really confusing part comes when you realize that sometimes Google Analytics doesn’t recognize the difference between people and not-people. Google Analytics is, after all, only an application, so there are limitations to what it can infer from appearances. And if the crawler appears to be a web browser, Google Analytics can’t tell the difference.